What Are You Collecting?: Judge Joseph A. Wapner

Among the inevitabilities of being a judge, especially a celebrated TV judge, is this: People give you gavels. During his 11-year tenure on “The People’s Court,” Judge Joseph A. Wapner received about a dozen. But Wapner, now retired, insists that most judges don’t use them. As a Superior Court judge, he says, “I never once used a gavel in 20 years. Even on ‘People’s Court,’ I used it mainly as a prop. You don’t need that if you have a bailiff to make order in the court.”

The desk in the office-den of Wapner’s Century City condominium is notably gavel-free; aside from three crystal models he keeps in his dining room, most of Wapner’s mini-mallets reside on the walls and shelves of his office-den. There are gavels embedded in plaques, miniatures (including a tiny wooden gavel key chain) and a gavel belonging to his father marked “1923 Hollywood K of P,” for the fraternal organization Knights of Pythias. (Wapner’s father was a lodge chancellor.)

Wapner received his favorite, a 3-foot-tall, 30-pound behemoth, in 1985 from colleagues at Telepictures to mark season four of his reign on “The People’s Court.” Around the same time, an admiring waiter crafted him a foil gavel that the judge kept until last summer, when he and his wife, Mickey, moved and decided to lose the aluminum (a discard His Honor now regrets).